Exabyte Density Control

We have a number of Exabyte 8505XL 8mm SCSI tape drives
attached to Debian systems here. I'm having trouble getting them to
write in lower density modes, and mt(1) doesn't seem to allow me to
change density as advertised. Otherwise, the drives work fine.
I've tried changing the density setting using:
mt setdensity 0xnn
...where nn is a variey of things, but in particular 14,
supposedly the value (from the output of "mt densities") for an
Exabyte 8200. "mt stat" always reports "Density code 0x0 (default)"
after such a command. Writing at this point produces a normal,
compressed high-density tape. The only time "mt stat" reports a
different density is if the currently loaded tape was written on a
different machine at a lower density.
I'd like to be able to write tapes in this older format for
reading on older drives. Any suggestions? Thanks...
--
Tres Hofmeister Research Applications Program
tres@ncar.ucar.edu National Center for Atmospheric Research
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